Friday, August 22, 2014

What's Happening In The Garden - Mid-August - Part 1

The tomatoes are finally producing loads of
fruit – enough to start some canning.
Only problem is I’ve never canned tomatoes before so there is a bit of a
learning curve…..and a supply issue. My plan was to can them in 1 litre (1 quart) jars and then I realized that the pot I used for
canning some jam is nowhere near tall enough to adequately cover the larger
jars with water.So I have ordered a canning
pot from Amazon – and now I wait.

In the meantime, I thought it was high time
to do another update on how all of the beds are doing.

First up is the squash.To backtrack a bit, I am growing 4 types of bush
squash, 2 plants of each. Three
varieties are summer squash, one is a winter squash. So far, one of the “Sure Thing” zucchini – the
largest plant – has produced the majority of the summer squash.The other Sure Thing is about a quarter of
the size and has produced exactly – zero.
﻿﻿

"Sure Thing" Summer Squash

The “Early Prolific” yellow squash is
proving to be, ironically enough, neither early nor prolific. It has only produced one squash on each of the
two plants and both of these were harvested last week.The “Dark Green” zucchini is even worse, with
one zucchini harvested last week from one plant and none from the other. These plants are in the main bed area beside a row of tomatoes.

﻿﻿

"Early Prolific" summer squash in the forefront
& one of the "Dark Green" at the top right corner

I know that I am probably planting them too
close together (they are spaced 24” apart).
But the thing is I don’t want to waste room as they never seem to grow
that big – or maybe they don’t grow that big because I am planting them too
closely.I’m hesitant to give them
more of my limited space, however, simply to be disappointed.

I am actively hand pollinating the squash
and have always thought that my issues with lack of pollination were due to
insufficient pollinators. But I’m coming
to realize that it may all stem from small plants with few flowers.Numerous times when I went out in the
morning, paintbrush in hand ready to pollinate, I found one or two female
blossoms open, but no male blossoms – I’m guessing that the number of blooms
would increase in proportion to the size of the plant. On a positive note, many
times I have seen bees deep inside the open blossoms, often with their little butts
sticking up in the air – they seem to stay inside the blossom for a huge amount of time, so obviously they
do love them.
﻿﻿

Bee Inside Squash Blossom

Next year, I may go a totally
different route. I’m thinking of planting the squash in straw bales, a method that seems
to be gaining popularity.This would not
only free up one of the beds, but then I could also try one or more of the
vining varieties and simply let it sprawl wherever I decide to place the bale.Hopefully sourcing straw bales won't be too difficult.

Now on to my one vining squash - Zucchetta
Tromboncino. I just LOVE this guy, even though I have only harvested one squash so far, but what a squash it was.I let it get quite big – 16” long & 746 grams (1.6 lbs!), but it was still beautifully tender. I’m definitely keeping this variety in the rotation.And another plus?No squash vine borer, even though the plants were uncovered during the entire season.Win win!

Baby Zucchetta Tromboncino

The first “gold nugget” winter squash has just changed colour and there is one more just starting to develop on the other bush.

﻿

"Gold Nugget" Winter Squash

You can see how pathetic my Gold Nugget plants are - I didn't even have to move any leaves out of the way to get that picture....sigh. And definitely not the plethora of squash I see when I google this variety:﻿﻿
﻿

I have not grown winter squash before
and, considering my track record with squash in general, I’m happy with the two that are maturing. Better than none, right?

All of the squash plants now have
Powdery Mildew, some worse than others.
I have been spraying them with a milk spray about every week or two
which I think has helped.Our weather has
been cool and wet for so long now (since the beginning of July) that I have a
feeling these plants would have already bit the dust were it not for the milk
spray.

On to cucumbers. The lemon cucumbers are awesome.They flower like crazy, which the pollinators
love, and for this reason alone I would likely include one of these in the
cucumber bed even if I wasn’t a fan of the cukes – which I most definitely am.They are refreshing and crisp and I find them
to be quite the treat.

"Lemon" Cucumbers

The Garden Sweet cucumbers are also doing very well –
for me, that is. Nothing compared to the
pounds of cucumbers that are being harvested by other bloggers, but I’m quite
happy.As I’m only beginning to learn
the ropes when it comes to preserving, an overabundance at this point
would be a bit too stressful.

"Garden Sweet" Cucumbers

Suyo Long is lagging behind the rest, but I
still get a cucumber here and there from it.
On the plus side, I think the lemon cukes and borage in the bed has
significantly helped this one in terms of pollination as I have only had a couple
that were not pollinated completely. Last year, every cuke had to be hand pollinated.

﻿

"Suyo Long" Cucumber in the Forefront

The Camelot shallots were harvested a
couple of weeks ago. I made a bit of a
goof on the onion bed around that time.I
was on the lookout for rain once the shallot tops had fallen over and sure
enough, a couple of days later, we did get quite a bit of rain, off and on.Well, I didn’t want the shallots or onions, for that matter, to get drenched
at this stage. I was certain that the onions were also approaching maturity. So I draped a sheet of light plastic over the bed when a bad
storm was imminent.

﻿

Onions - Ready for the Storm

Big mistake. What looks to be a light billowy sheet of
plastic on top of the stiff onion tops turns into a fifty pound weight when the
rain comes down in torrents.

Huge Rain Puddles Squashing the Onions

My mistake was in not providing any support
for the plastic…something which I quickly remedied by putting in hoops.But the damage had been done – a few of the
Copra and at least ¼ of the Rossa di Milano onion stems were bent as a result.

﻿

﻿

You Can See the Path of Bent Stems Created by the Puddles

A large portion of the Rossa di Milano tops fell over last week and I ended up harvesting these as we were expecting even more rain over a few days. The rain has been intermittent lately, with sunny periods in between. I didn’t want to bother with covering the beds as they would have baked when the sun came out and it was just too much work to cover and uncover them 2 or 3 times each day.
﻿﻿

Almost all
of the remaining Rossa di Milano and most of the copras started to fall over early this
week, so I bent down their tops and the plan was to harvest them by next
week. However, with another two full days of rain in the forecast, I ended up pulling them a couple of days
ago.

The perennial bunching onions are getting
larger, and there is finally evidence of some division on one of them.

He-Shi-Ko Perennial Bunching Onion
If you look closely on the right hand side of the onion,
you can see a new division starting

And the Ailsa Craigs are getting bigger – one of them is downright huge. So
exciting, although I have no idea how I’m going to use up such a huge
onion.The stems on a couple of them had fallen
over and these were also harvested earlier this week.I am still waiting on the rest.

"Ailsa Craig" Onions
The one in the middle is humongous!! Can't wait to weigh it.

A couple of the potato onions have also
fallen over, the rest are still standing tall.Not much seems to be happening above ground
on most of them but I do see evidence of bulbs under the soil so we shall have to wait and see
once they are harvested.

Potato Onion
One of the few with the bulb exposed aboveground

I have been trying to keep ahead of the
bacterial brown spot on the beans and I think it is helping.I trimmed most of the leaves on the bottom of
the plants and am consistently removing any diseased beans.Most of these were at the bottom of the
vines, but I did remove a few from higher up.
I also cleaned up the ground, removing all dead leaves.

Bean Vines
"Cherokee Trail of Tears" on the Left; "Golden of Bacau" on the Right

The Golden of Bacau are still producing,
although they do seem to be slowing down especially in how quickly the beans
are developing. I’m hopeful that I will
have at least a couple more harvests this year.

"Golden of Bacau" Romano Beans

I have decided to take a bit of a gamble
with the Trail of Tears beans. I really
want to harvest them as dried beans so I have been holding off on harvesting
those and I am crossing my fingers that the disease progresses slowly. A few beans at the bottom of the vine were infected & these were removed. The rest seem to be doing ok so far.

"Cherokee Trail of Tears" Beans

The Contender bush beans were all ripped
out a couple of weeks ago. Last week I
planted some kale and broccoli transplants into the spot vacated by the beans.

"Munchkin" Broccoli & "Dwarf Green Curled" Kale

Four of the pepper plants, which I talked
about in a post
last week, are the only other crop in this section.

So that is what has been happening in the
four new beds on the south side of the yard.
You may have noticed that I have not fenced off these beds yet.I simply haven’t gotten around to it and they
have not sustained any damage from rabbits. The same thing happened when I built the first four beds 3 years ago – the first year, there was no
damage; the second year, my crops were bunny food within days of my transplants
being set outside. I’m hoping to put the
fencing up this fall so that I am set for next spring.

Till next time…☺

“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things” ~~ Robert Brault

12 comments:

Too bad your squash doesn't like to grow. My zucchini grows big enough. Too big really. But it doesn't like to set zucchinis. I think next year I'm going to try different varieties. The problem is that I love the taste of this one and a lot of others are just so so.

I had powdery mildew on all my squashes but they still seemed to produce quite good crops, I guess they produced enough healthy leaves to keep ahead of the mildew (on the whole anyway...not all of them have been great). I did try that milk trick for the first time but then forgot to do it again..oops! I find butternut squashes take ages to get going, only just setting fruit, possibly too late now the cool weather has come. Also my custard marrow-type squashes are always late....only had two teeny fruits so far, mainly been male flowers. But the gherkins have done well, and the cukes...yeh those crystal lemons are really good. Still got lots of little fruits that'll hopefully keep on growing for a little while longer :)

I haven't been as good as I should have been at remembering to spray the squash plants either - I think you are supposed to spray them every week but I would usually forget and it ended up being every two weeks. I'm really looking forward to growing more varieties of winter squash next year, like butternut - and I'll probably be all anxious about them setting fruit as everyone seems to say the same thing you do - that they take their sweet time to develop.

I am fortunate to never have experienced powdery mildew in the few years of growing winter squash - probably my favourite crop of anything I grow - butternut is my favourite and I've grown spaghetti squash for the first time as well. You may have only one "gold nugget" but it sure looks perfect. And your onions are fabulous!

Thanks Susie! You are indeed lucky - I get PM every single year. The milk spray helps but hasn't eliminated the problem although I'm not the most diligent person when it comes to applying it. And definitely can't WAIT to try different varieties of winter squash next year.

The Golden Nugget squash is pretty, but I’m sorry that you’re not getting more of them. It’s always disappointing when things don’t produce as abundantly as we anticipate. I look forward to reading about your canning experience. I don’t have enough to can this year.

I love the Tromboncino squash too. I'm thinking that I may just grow that next year and take a break from the hyper productive Romanesco. Powdery mildew is a huge problem in my garden, some things I can only grow resistant varieties, when I do treat for it though I use a 70% extraction Neem Oil, it is much more effective than milk sprays, it's organic and it smells much better than milk and doesn't leave white spots all over everything.

That's a great tip - I had never heard of using Neem Oil for PM. This year it is a little too late - I'm actually pulling one of my plants out today as it is totally covered now. But I'll remember that for next year.

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